


The Grief Clause

by newtypeshadow



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Crushes, Drinking, Drinking to Cope, Excessive Drinking, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Minor Bucky Barnes/Tony Stark, Past Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Project Insight (Marvel), Protective Jarvis (Iron Man movies), Tony and JARVIS never stopped hacking SHIELD after The Avengers, Tony finds out who killed his parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 06:17:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18544012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newtypeshadow/pseuds/newtypeshadow
Summary: Tony’s had JARVIS keep an eye on SHIELD since hacking them duringThe Avengers. So when JARVIS tells Tony that Nick Fury is dead, SHIELD is trying to arrest Steve and Natasha for treason, and a guy in BDSM combat gear nearly killed them both on a highway, Tony has JARVIS dig into things.On the day of Project Insight, however, Tony can’t fly out to help. JARVIS has locked down his suits, and tells Tony three things that leave him reeling and dangerously unfit to fly.





	The Grief Clause

**Author's Note:**

> There are certainly explanations for why Zemo figured out the Starks were murdered and Tony didn’t, despite Tony having hacked those same SHIELD files during _The Avengers_ …but seeing as “plot convenience for the _Civil War_ reveal” is the most compelling, I called foul wrote this fic.

It’s not that Tony forgot he’d hacked into SHIELD’s computers during his first ride on the helicarrier. It’s just that, what with aliens invading Manhattan, flying a nuke through a wormhole and discovering Earth was woefully outmatched, and redesigning Stark Tower into Avengers Tower, trawling through SHIELD’s data to find out what else they were hiding took a backseat to a ton of other responsibilities and high priority projects.

If there’s anything particularly interesting going on, JARVIS will tell him. JARVIS can multitask and never sleeps, and he knows Tony well enough to intuit what to share. Besides, Tony never got around to telling JARVIS _not_ to monitor SHIELD’s systems for nefarious plans and weaponry—or for information about Howard Stark, because Tony’s sure as shit not letting Nick Fury blindside him about his father again.

But again, a lot’s been going on in Tony Stark’s life since the Chitauri, and while dating Pepper and modifying Extremis and removing the arc reactor made him get healthier overall, losing the Avengers’ presence in his home to SHIELD work, Asgard, and Bruce’s personal Doctors Without Borders dive into off-grid anonymity, has made spending time outside his lab or R&D less satisfying. And as spectacular a grand gesture as destroying all his suits for Pepper was, Tony still wakes up in a cold sweat with visions of the Chitauri descending upon a defenseless Earth in full force, while the Avengers lay dying at his feet, so he quietly starts building Iron Man suits again. He doesn’t miss hurting people, but he misses helping people in the thick of things, and goddamn does he miss being able to fly.

Pepper finds out, of course. Pepper always does, she knows him too well, and they love each other, so it was inevitable. And she breaks up with him and shuts him out for a good six months while they re-learn to be Pepper and Tony instead of Pepper-and-Tony. Tony slips back into unhealthy habits, goes on inventing binges for sleepless days on end if only to combat the inevitable sleeplessness from nightmares, which grow more frequent when he sleeps without being held. The two will eventually fall back into a friendly equilibrium, and Pepper will remain one of Tony’s best friends for the rest of his life…but he doesn’t know that when shit really hits the fan.

The breakup is still fresh when JARVIS tells Tony that Nick Fury is dead, and SHIELD has a BOLO for Steve and Natasha and are calling them traitors. Tony has JARVIS dig hard into that, and then, when a man in BDSM combat gear almost kills Steve and Nat in hand-to-hand combat on a highway, he has JARVIS dig hard into that man too.

The Winter Soldier is what he’s called. JARVIS pulls every file SHIELD has on him, which is how Tony finds out SHIELD has become a front for Hydra, and Project Insight is going to kill _everyone_ who could stop Hydra, and Steve and Nat are in way over their heads. The best he can do on maybe a day’s notice is program three processors, one per helicarrier, and send Happy and a drone to get them safely to Maria Hill. The rest is up to Steve and Nat.

Because the day it all goes down, Tony has given all employees in the Tower the day off, and before he can get into a suit to go help, JARVIS locks down his suits and tells him three things that knock him on his ass.

1\. The Winter Soldier is the codename for American POW Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, best friend and right hand of Steven Grant Rogers aka Captain America. Although assumed killed in action fighting Hydra in 1944, Barnes was in fact captured by Soviets and sold to Hydra’s Dr. Arnim Zola while the man ostensibly worked for SHIELD.


Tony doesn’t know if it’s better or worse that his childhood crush and first masturbatory fantasy wasn’t actually dead at the time.

Or what it says about him that despite what is obviously a photo of POW Barnes frozen in a cryogenic tube, he thinks Barnes’s long hair is definitely working for him.

He wonders if Steve knows that’s who he was fighting on the highway. If maybe Steve and Nat had been holding back because they knew who the Winter Soldier was.

2\. Hydra’s experiments on Sergeant James Barnes turned him into a super soldier, gave him a metal left arm, wiped all memories of his life before he fell from the train, and have kept him a loyal, brainwashed assassin for Hydra since the 1970s.


Fuck. “J, I want to know everything they did to him,” Tony says, fingers unconsciously tapping his chest where the arc reactor used to sit. He wonders if Barnes knew about the metal arm before Zola attached it. He blinks away the memory of waking to all-consuming pain, a deep hole in his chest. The memory of carrying a car battery and his terror each time the wires came loose.

Tony knows next to nothing about brainwashing or forced amnesia, but he knows more than Steve tries to let on about how deeply Steve hungers for pieces of his past. Tony stopped visiting Aunt Peggy when the Alzheimers really took hold, but he keeps tabs on her; he knows Steve has visited a few times already. Maybe it’s possible for the old Bucky Barnes to resurface from the Winter Soldier. It’s worth a shot. Tony rattles off notes to himself about neuroscientists, specs for this “Chair” JARVIS highlighted mention of in a few different documents, and state of the art prostheses.

He doesn’t ask who the Winter Soldier killed. It wasn’t Barnes that did it, and no one Tony knows has been assassinated. He’s selfish enough to not want to know.

But then JARVIS projects a new document in front of him, and Tony’s cacophonous brain just—stops.

Everything stops.

3\. On December 16th 1991, the Winter Soldier killed Howard and Maria Stark.


There are mission details, something about a super soldier serum Howard was transporting, the mention of a security camera tape at some warehouse in Siberia, but the information is useless because Tony’s brain is short-circuiting. The projections around him, JARVIS’s concern, the florescent lights that are suddenly interminably bright—all of it is junk data, the useless hum of machinery, as irrelevant as Tony’s order to send him a suit, and the suit not appearing, and not appearing, no matter what he does to call it up through the floor. Useless as Tony’s feet carrying him to the liquor cabinet he moved back into the lab after Pepper abandoned him—like Steve, the Avengers, like Howard from the first. Useless as Tony’s hands pulling down a bottle of good scotch, and the burn down his throat that tastes too much like coming home.

Tony Stark hasn’t gotten blackout drunk since he was twenty-one, and police informed him Howard had killed himself and Tony’s mother in a drunk driving accident.

Well, Howard got them both killed, but it wasn’t a drunk driving accident, was it.

Tony can drink if he wants to. Pepper’s gone, his childhood crush murdered his mom, and by tomorrow he might be dead too. Who the fuck cares anymore. Not Tony. He just wants to be numb. Or unconscious. Or dead.

Like his parents.

#

Tony wakes up on the floor of his destroyed lab the following afternoon to find Project Insight has literally crashed and burned; Natasha dumped all of SHIELD’s files onto the internet; Nick Fury is actually alive; and Fury, the Winter Soldier, Steve, and Nat are all in the wind.

Apparently Tony asked JARVIS to start moving as many files as he could pertaining to Howard Stark, the Avengers, and the Winter Soldier from SHIELD’s servers to his own—not that Tony remembers anything after binge drinking hour number two—but JARVIS went above and beyond, as usual, and while he couldn’t get everything, he apparently took it upon himself to save a number of undercover operatives’ lives, pull all Stark Industries proprietary tech information, and the weapons specs from SHIELD’s databases as well.

“JARVIS, you are the light of my life,” Tony says in lieu of thanks when he’s sober and caffeinated and his mouth doesn’t taste like mold.

_Bucky Barnes killed my mom._

The lab is a mess. He needs to clean up this mess so he can get back to work.

_Bucky Barnes killed my mom._

“J, play something loud,” Tony says even though his head still hurts. The pain in his skull and scream of guitars gives him something to focus on that isn’t wrathful grief. All he wants is to hunt down Barnes and repulsor him in the face. Bash in his skull so it matches the way his parents looked when he foolishly went to the morgue to identify them. The coroner said they died on impact, but he also said Howard was driving drunk, so what else had he lied about to Tony’s face?

Tony flips his wrist to call up a suit.

Nothing comes.

“I’m afraid the suits have been locked down as per the Drunk Driving protocol,” JARVIS says.

“I’m not drunk,” Tony says.

“Your judgment is impaired.”

“My judgment is _fine_.”

“My apologies, Sir, but Miss Potts amended the protocol shortly before she moved out of the tower. Sending you a suit now would violate the Grief clause.”

Tony gapes. “ _Grief_ clause? What the fuck is the Grief clause?” But Tony knows before JARVIS tells him, because Tony knows Pepper, and Pepper knows Tony too well. She didn’t want him to self-destruct, and knew mourning their failed relationship would cloud his judgment. It’s just his fucking luck grief over his parents fits those parameters.

_Bucky Barnes killed my mom, and I can’t suit up to kill him back._

Tony could work around that, probably. Turn JARVIS off, boot up one of the baby programs like FRIDAY or JOCASTA, use them to suit up and help him find the Winter Soldier and burn him to ash.

And then have to face JARVIS when he inevitably rebooted him. And Steve when he inevitably found out Tony murdered the most important person in his life instead of helping him get back to Steve. And face his father’s derisive smile in his memory, telling Tony that if Captain America were alive, he would be so disappointed in Tony. And the knowledge that if Tony were good, like his mom, he’d see Barnes as a victim and help him recover his life.

If Tony cries in the privacy of his own lab, only JARVIS will know, and JARVIS won’t tell anyone. Who would he tell, anyway? No one is here but Tony and the bots, and no one else lives in the Tower.

_The Winter Soldier killed my mom. And she would try to help Bucky Barnes._

Tony will never be as good as his mom, or as goddamned fucking stupid as his dad, carrying that serum with her in the car and _no security_ —

But he doesn’t have to be, because he has people like Pepper and JARVIS to keep him from fucking up. Their conspiracy is making it difficult for Tony to impulse-murder the Winter Soldier for killing his mom… (They call him the Merchant of Death. _Is this the legacy of the great Tony Stark?_ ) …but it’s also given him time, just enough time, to think second thoughts.

Thoughts like his mother would want him to have. Howard would choose revenge. Maria would choose compassion. And Tony can choose, if nothing else, to not fly off and murder the national treasure who’s Captain America’s best friend.

Besides, the lab is trashed. Tony can’t build a new suitto kill Barnes with if his lab is trashed. He can clean up now and kill Barnes later, if he wants. And in the meantime, “J, pull up all the names associated with the mission to kill my parents.” Those Hydra goons aren’t best friends with Steve Rogers. And they probably have firsthand knowledge of how Hydra kept Barnes its Winter Soldier. Hunting them down will help Steve, hurt ~~them~~ whatever is left of Hydra, and probably supersede the Grief clause with public safety. Win-win-win.

And hey, if Tony is hunting Hydra to help dismantle the Winter Soldier, Steve might ask for Tony’s help pulling the Bucky Barnes Tony was once enamored of back out of him, and he’ll move back into the Tower. And maybe Natasha will come with him. And if Nat’s here, Bruce might come back. And Clint will resume popping in from time to time.

And Tony won’t be alone anymore.

He’s so damned tired of being alone.

“JARVIS, turn the music back up,” Tony says, and lets his mind spin out plans like they’re pieces on a chessboard. He can rebuild the Avengers around Barnes just as surely as he and his bots are rebuilding the lab around him. They’ll be a team again. And perhaps, in time, they’ll even be a family—one strong enough to replace all the families they’ve lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading—I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, please let me know via kudos/comments! ^_^


End file.
